All Rise...

Editor's Note

The Charge

Bikes! Babes! Bands!

The Case

I really can't stand when people (or musicians as the case may be) wind up
being the good time party boys who like the fact that they're in a band and
refer to women as "babes." It reminds me of the hair metal tripe of
the '80s that I couldn't stand and quite frankly enjoyed watching wither on the
vine.

So without being really familiar with their music, I wasn't quite sure what
to expect when I watched Nickelback perform at Sturgis, South Dakota, during the
2006 Bike Week. The only thing I knew about them was that they started to become
famous with the 2001 hit "How You Remind Me," and they wrote the
single from the first Spiderman film, "Hero." 2005 found them
achieving huge success. With the release of their album "All the Right
Reasons," they saw five of those songs achieve Top 20 status, with three
breaking into the Top 10. The popularity of the songs on the album has led to
over seven million copies of it being sold, and as it so happens, influenced the
Canadian group's trip to Bike Week to perform for over 35,000. The play list
from that concert is:

Now when it comes to Canadian rock acts, I'm probably not the brightest bulb
in the lamp, but Nickelback (based on the sales I mentioned earlier) appears to
be quite popular. But when I was listening to and watching this show, I saw a
bunch of guys who don't really do anything all that original on stage. Oooh, the
singer sees a whole bunch of sunburnt and beer-marinated boobies in the crowd,
he's a rebel vagabond! If he was such a rebel, he wouldn't be copying Def
Leppard or Kelly Clarkson songs titles. The music isn't entirely mind-blowing
either; when you listen to it without the video on, it sounds kind
of…ordinary. But to use another Canadian as a vocal comparison, it sounds
like Gordon Lightfoot had just downed three quarts of white vinegar before doing
a show, and decided to go electric. It was a wholly uninteresting performance
for this particular music enthusiast.

Technically, at least it was filmed in high definition and it presented in
1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen. For standard definition it looks mighty sharp,
with no edge enhancements, a clean print and detail that is much better than
expected. There's a Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 soundtracks, a simulated surround
track (which comes through as a two-channel surround track) and a DTS track, all
of which sound solid and spatial with a dynamic soundstage. There's even some
bonus material here which amounts to some interview footage and a music video,
but that's about it.

From a novice's point of view, Nickelback is live and performing in
Sturgis, but the rest of it is a little grey. As performers, they've got a long
way to go before they do something that borders on original. Creatively, there's
not really a whole lot there either. For fans of the band, a quick note that
there is some censored swearing (for whatever reason), so purists might not like
that development. If you like the band, you'll like the concert, but not nearly
enough to buy.